Tearful friends and family members gathered to bid a sad farewell to Imette St. Guillen yesterday in Boston – at once recalling the grad-school beauty’s boundless enthusiasm and grappling with the senselessness of her savage rape and murder.

“I want to wrap my arms around you and ease any ounce of pain you have ever felt in your whole life,” said her weeping sister, Alejandra. “I can’t say goodbye to you. I can’t find the words. I’ll be saying goodbye to you every day for the rest of my life.

“Be at peace, Imette.”

As the body lay in an open white casket, some 700 mourners packed the William J. Gormley Funeral Home and took turns sharing their recollections of a beloved young woman who had come to New York in August 2004 to study forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“She was so enthusiastic to be moving to New York,” said her Upper West Side roommate, Rebecah Reilly.

But even as they yearned to remember St. Guillen for the person she was, everyone in the room struggled with the fact that the psycho who killed her was still on the loose.

“Though haunted by thoughts of violence, we gather here this morning to invite the spirit of peace into Imette’s life and memory,” the Rev. Rosemary Lloyd said. “We come not to hold up the senselessness of her death but to honor the gift and beauty of her life. ”

St. Guillen disappeared shortly before dawn last Saturday after a night out on the town. Police believe that she was snatched off a SoHo street by a sex-crazed stranger who raped her – and that something caused the fiend to panic.

He stuffed a sock in her mouth, wrapped her face with transparent tape and strangled her before finally dumping the nude body, by then swaddled in a blanket, on a remote street in the gritty East New York section of Brooklyn.

Seventeen hours after St. Guillen was last reported seen, police found her body in a field notorious as a Mafia dumping ground.

Yesterday, her mother, Maureen, tried to stay strong.

“You were – and are – the love of my life,” she said, maintaining a stoic composure. “And when I need to speak to you, it will be private and I will go into my heart, where you will always be.

“You are my heart, my soul, my conscience and my life. You are my daughter.”

An overflow crowd stood in the bitter cold outside the funeral home to listen to the Unitarian service through loudspeakers. A police honor guard – St. Guillen’s stepbrother is a motorcycle cop – came early to pay its respects.

As her friends from the prestigious Boston Latin School and George Washington University, where she earned her undergraduate degree, took turns speaking, a picture emerged of a loving young woman who was at once focused and carefree.

“Upon first meeting her, as a seventh-grader, I remember how Imette’s vivacious presence brightened my day,” said her best friend, Claire Higgins, who had accompanied her to SoHo on that last night.

“Her beautiful character continued to touch my heart and the hearts of everyone she came in contact with throughout the years of her life.

“Imette’s enthusiasm for life was evident in all that she did, whether it was trimming her family’s Christmas tree, sending pizza to her teacher’s house in junior high school or running a bake sale to raise funds for the swim team. Imette’s excitement for the small things was infectious.”

Other friends noted that she loved board games, particularly Taboo, that she’d bake chocolate-chip cookies with peanut-butter cups in the middle and that she loved to dance and was well traveled, having studied in Australia and Germany.

She was active, too, having played in a New York dodge-ball league, they said, yet loved to curl up on the couch for an evening of chocolate and the ultimate Big Apple TV show.

“It was great to come into our warm apartment at 10 o’clock on a Tuesday night, exhausted and stressed to find the beaming Imette cozy on the couch watching ‘Sex and the City’ and professing, ‘You can’t go to bed until you see this episode,’ ” said Reilly, her roommate.

As for her beauty, it was apparent to all around her.

“Imette recently told me that the greatest compliment she’d ever received was from an old boyfriend who told her the moment he first saw her that she was breathtaking,” Higgins said. “Imette, you are breathtaking – in every way.”

The killer, her friends agreed, failed to extinguish her spirit.

“In the tears that we shed and the accomplishments that we celebrate, we know that she is with us,” Higgins said, her voice quavering.